Contents

Description

From the Wikipedia:

"A hackerspace or hackspace (from Hacker and Space, sometimes referred to as a makerspace in reference to Make Magazine.) is a real (as opposed to virtual) place where people with common interests, usually in science, technology, or digital or electronic art can meet, socialise and collaborate. A hackerspace can be viewed as an open community lab, workbench, machine shop, workshop and/or studio where people of diverse backgrounds can come together to share resources and knowledge to build/make things."
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hackerspace)

Discussing the definition, by Jarkko Moilanen:

"A simple and compact definition is still missing even among the persons who a involved in Hackerspaces. Yet some discussion about this has occured among the participants. I participate in the discussion list of hackerspaces since I’m a founder and member of our local Hackerspace (5w) in Tampere, Finland. I began to browse the discussion archives of ‘Hackerspaces General Discussion List‘ which is publicly available here. The archives included discussion sbetween Jul 20th 2008 and Nov 16th 2009. I expected to find some hints and thoughts related to the question ‘What is a hackerspace?’. Very soon after looking at the archive content I noticed that there is a lot of discussion about this topic. It seems that the community is still defining the meaning of hackerspace."
(http://blog.ossoil.com/2009/11/14/viewpoints-to-the-development-of-hackerspaces/)

Typology

Jarkko Moilanen:

"A topic which has been raised several times and in several contexts in the hackerspaces discussion list and IRC channel is what is a hackerspace. Some discussion has been about how to make a suitable division to ‘true’ hackerspaces and ‘others’. The rhetorics of this kind of discussion is about building the identity of hackerspaces. The rhetorics resembles the common identity definition process in all communities which is often related to ‘we’ and ‘others’ kind of thinking. Several kind of categorizations have been suggested. Most common categorization is about whether a ’space’ is commercial or non-commercial or as one hacker puts it: “as to how to distinguish spaces that are not ‘Non-Profit, Member-Run’ Hackerspaces.”

Some have suggested that the financial models, governance models, real estate models, philosophical models and occupational models could be used as categories. It must be noted that the categorizations should not be seen as binary; black or white. Hardly any space is a perfect (or clean) example of any categorization. They are more or less combinations or different ’shades of grey’. In brief the division or tagging of hackerspace should describe the breadth of spaces out there, without having to get too deep into distinction between ‘we’ and ‘others’. The above suggested categories sound valid. Yet another category could be the political activity or interest to society related issues. In other words, the hacktivistic nature of hackerspace. Could some hackerspaces be seen as physical extensions of hacktivism?"
(http://blog.ossoil.com/2010/09/05/hacktivism-and-hackerspaces/)

Discussion

Jarkko Moilanen:

1.

"In this post I will try to define hackerspaces by comparing them to traditional, larger hacker culture and community. The idea for this post came to my mind while writing the “Viewpoints to the development of Hackerspaces”. Every hacker group and other computer related groups or clubs can not be called hackerspaces. Some groups that would look like a hackerspace don’t even want to be labelled as hackerspaces. Some hackerspaces avoid using the word itself in the groups name or in the descriptions of their group. Reasons for avoiding the word hackerspace vary but the most common is related to the uncertainty of how ‘others’ will react to anything that includes or refers to ‘hacker’. This fear of the opinions of other is an example of how communities are shaped, defined and identified also by others than the members of community. Jordan and Taylor (1998) have written an article about hacker communities (“A Sociology of hackers”) and I will use that article as the main starting point.

According to Jordan and Taylor the ‘imagined community’ of hackers can be described with six internal aspects and through exploring the community’s boundary between itself and the others(Jordan & Taylor 1998, 762-775). In this post community is understood as Jordan & Taylor so neatly put it: “[...]collective identity that members of a social group construct or, in a related way, as the ‘collective imagination’ of a social group. Both a collective identity and imagination allow individuals to recognise in each other membership of the same community.”(Jordan & Taylor 1998, 762-763). Previously mentioned 6 internal factors are: technology, secrecy, anonymity, membership fluidity, male dominance and motivations."
(http://blog.ossoil.com/2009/11/17/sociological-view-of-hackers-and-hackerspaces/)

"Both generations - hackerspaces and Hacktivists - have a lot in common. Both see the possibility of real and virtual, the material and immaterial to merge and coexist. Common antagonistic division of the above worls in traditional hacker communities is blurred in hackerspaces and hacktivism.

Hackerspaces can be seen as the ‘third place’,a setting beyond home and work in which people relax, have fun and meet other hackers in some shared space and do so on a regular basis. Hackerspaces break the intrinsic nature of hacker communities, since they aim to reach to the public to lure more members, are open to public and wish to be part of the surrounding community. Hackerspaces are extrovert version of formerly introvert and closed hacker communities. Although hackerspace can be labelled as a ‘third place’, it is a small local community which is technically oriented, not a knitting club or tee party."
(http://blog.ossoil.com/2010/11/20/extrovert-hacker-generations-hacktivism-and-hackerspaces/)

History

"Hackerspaces began to form during the late 90s, but the grounds for hackerspaces were constructed around the turn of the millennium in Germany by CCC. (Farr 2009) During that time, hackerspaces began to organize as assosiations or alike, became known to the public and identified hacker ethic as one of the key elements to guide activities. The year 2001 was a turning point for hackerspaces. during that time several still existing spaces were established. (Moilanen 2009) One possible reason for the growth might be the recession around the millenium, which was in general one of the ‘best’ recessions in history. The overall economical effects of the recession were relatively small.(Nordhaus 2002, 200-204) Yet it affected the IT sector and the technology bubble had just bursted in Silicon Valley. Therefore several companies were forced to reduce resources in IT expenditures and a lot of ‘hackers’ were laid off in Europe and in US. The hackers still needed a community to attach and different forms of ‘fabbing’ communities offered a new ‘place’ for them. For the above reasons I have located hackerspaces generation to begin at 2001.

Hackerspaces are hacker versions of ‘third places’ defined by Oldenburg. According to Oldenburg ‘third places’ refer to separate social settings or surroundings from the ‘first place’ (home and other similar settings) and ’second place’ (workplace). (Oldenburg, 1999) The third places are ‘anchors’ of community life, facilitate and foster broader, more creative interaction. These places serve as focal points of community life, which has eroded due to commercial chains and unifunctional zoning policy.(Oldenburg, 2001, 3) In other words, we have abandoned public parks, playgrounds, schools, cafees and little local stores as places for community life. We have been growing apart from one anothers since the second World War. Third places are needed to reconnect to each other and strengthen community ties. To become a succesful third place, they must be locally owned, independent and small-scale and be based on steady-state business.(Oldenburg, 2001, 4) Furthermore, the places should be highly accessible, within walking distance, free or cheap and involve regularity. When these criterias are compared to hackerspaces, the similarities become obvious.

Eventhough a compact definition of hackerspaces is missing, some features can be assosiated with it. Firstly, a hackerspace is owned and run by it’s members in a spirit of equality. Secondly, it is a nonprofit organization, and open to the outside world on a (semi)regular basis. Thirdly, members of hackerspace share tools, equipment and ideas without discrimination even to outsiders. Fourthly, is has a strong emphasis on technology and invention. Fifthly, it has a shared space (or is working on a space) as a center of the community. Finally, it has a strong spirit of invention and science, based on trial, error, and freely sharing information. Hackerspaces are spesialiced third places for technically oriented people. Hackerspaces function to serve hackers’ “need to construct the infrastructures of human relationships”(Oldenburg, 2001, 2)

Hackerspaces want to be part of surrounding community to enhance technological knowledge and bring people together including the ones who are not so technology prone. Hackerspaces offer knowledge and skills to surrounding community and arrange classes, courses and demonstrations about various topics. They seem to rely on attraction rather than agitation. They also want to create a positive attitude towards technology and the possibilities it can offer to everyone. In this sense hackerspaces promote the hacker ethic, where one key aspect is: “You can create art and beauty on a computer.” (Levy, 1984, 43) and another one: “Computers can change your life for the better”. (Levy, 1984, 45)."

"Hacker camping was initiated by a series of events in Netherlands running since 1989. These experiences solidified and popularised the hacker movement and the desire for permanent hacker spaces was part of this development.

As Nick Farr (2009) has pointed out, the first wave of pioneering hackerspaces were founded in the 1990s, just as were hacklabs. L0pht stated in 1992 in the Boston area as a membership based club that offered shared physical and virtual infrastructure to select people. Some other places were started in those years in the USA based on this “covert” model. In Europe, C-base in Berlin started with a more public profile in 1995, promoting free access to the Internet and serving as a venue for various community groups. These second wave spaces “proved that hackers could be perfectly open about their work, organise officially, gain recognition from the government and respect from the public by living and applying the Hacker ethic in their efforts” (Farr, 2009). However, it is with the current, third wave that the number of hackerspaces begun to grow exponentially and it developed into a global movement of sorts. I argue that the term hackerspaces was not widely used before this point and the small number of hackerspaces that existed were less consistent and did not yet develop the characteristics of a movement. Notably, this is in constrast with narrative of the hacklabs presented earlier which appeared as a more consistent political movement.

Several accounts (for example Anon, 2008) highlight a series of talks in 2007 and 2008 that inspired, and continue to inspire, the foundation of new hackerspaces. Judging from registered hackerspaces, however, the proliferation seems to have started earlier. In 2007 Farr organised a project called Hackers on a Plane, which brought hackers from the USA to the Chaos Communication Congress, and included a tour of hackerspaces in the area. Ohlig and Weiler from the C4 hackerspace in Cologne gave a ground-braking talk on the conference entitled Building a Hackerspace (2007). The presentation defined the hackerspace design patterns, which are written in the form of a catechism and provide solutions to common problems that arise during the organisation of the hackerspace. More importantly, it has canonised the concept of hackerspaces and put the idea of setting up new ones all over the world on the agenda of the hacker movement. When the USA delegation returned home, they presented their experiences under the programmatic title Building Hacker Spaces Everywhere: Your Excuses are Invalid. They argued that “four people can start a sustainable hacker space”, and showed how to do it (Farr et al, 2008). The same year saw the launch of hackerspaces.org, in Europe with Building an international movement: hackerspaces.org (Pettis et al, 2008), and also in August at the North American HOPE (Anon, 2008). While the domain is registered since 2006, the Internet Archive saw the first website there in 2008 listing 72 hackerspaces. Since then the communication platforms provided by the portal became a vital element in the hackerspaces movement, sporting the slogan “build! unite! multiply!” (hackerspaces.org, 2011). A survey of the founding date of the 500 registered hackerspaces show a growing trend from 2008 (see Figure 2).

Notably, most of these developments focused on the formal characteristics of hackerspaces, for instance how to manage problems and grow a community. They emphasised an open membership model for maintaining a common workspace that functions as a cooperative socialising, learning and production environment. However, the content of the activities going on in hackerspaces also shows great consistency. The technologies used can be described as layers of sedimentation: newer technologies take their place alongside older ones without it becoming entirely obsolete. First of all, the fact that hackers collaborate in a physical space meant a resurgence of work on electronics, which conjoined with the established trend of tinkering with physical computers. A rough outline of connected research areas could be (in order of appearance): free software development, computer recycling, wireless mesh networking, microelectronics, open hardware, 3D printing, machine workshops and cooking.

From this rudimentary time line, it is evident that activities in hackerspaces have gravitated towards the physical. The individual trajectories of all these technology areas could be unfolded, but here the focus will be on microelectronics. This choice of focus is merited because microelectronics played a key role in kickstarting hackerspaces, as evidenced by the popularity of basic electronic classes and programmable microcontroller workshops in the programme of young hackerspaces. Physical computing was layed out by Igoe and O’Sullivan in Physical Computing: Sensing and Controlling the Physical World with Computers (2004), and had a great impact on the whole computing scene. This new framework of human-machine interaction stressed the way people behave in everyday situations using their whole body, and opened the way for exploratory research through the construction of intelligent appliances. The next year O’Reilly Media started to publish Make Magazine which focuses on do-it-yourself technology, including tutorials, recipes, and commentary. Among the authors one find many of the celebrities of the hacker subculture. “The first magazine devoted to digital projects, hardware hacks, and DIY inspiration. Kite aerial photography, video cam stabiliser, magnetic stripe card reader, and much more.” (Make Magazine, 2011) In Europe, Massimo Banzi and others started to work on the invention of Arduino, a programmable microcontroller board with an easy-to-use software interface. This amateur-friendly microcontroller system became the staple of hackerspaces and artists’ workshops and initiated a whole new generation into rapid prototyping and electronics work. To put it together, physical computing provided a theoretical area to be explored, and the Arduino became its killer application, while Make magazine and similar media facilitated the spread of research results. It is open to speculation how this trend fits into the bigger picture of what seems to be a shift in sensibilities in society at large. If the 1990s was marked by a preoccupation with discourses and languages, preeminence is now given to materialities and embodiedness.

The Hungarian Autonomous Center for Knowledge in Budapest is a fairly typical third wave hackerspace. It was founded in 2009 after a presentation at the local new tech meetup, itself inspired by the hackerspaces presentation in Berlin (Stef, 2009). The location is comprised of a workspace, kitchen, chill-out room and terrace in an inner city cultural centre which hosts ateliers for artists along with a pub and some shops. The rent is covered by membership fees and donations from individuals, companies and other organisations. Members are entitled to a key, while visitors can look up when the space is open thanks to a real time signal system called Hacksense. It displays the status of the lab on the website, the twitter account and a database. Thus, visitors are welcome any time, and especially at the announced events that happen a few times every month. These include meetings and community events, as well as practical workshops, presentations and courses. In line with the hackerspaces design patterns, orientating discussions happen weekly on Tuesdays, where decisions are made based on a rough consensus. Hackathons are special events where several people work on announced topics for six hours or a whole day. These events are sometimes synchronised internationally with other hackspaces. However, most of the activity happens on a more ad-hoc basis, depending on the schedule and the whim of the participants. For this reason, the online chat channel and the wiki website are heavily used for coordination, documentation and socialisation. Projects usually belong to one or more individual, but some projects are endorsed by almost everybody.

Among the projects housed at Hungarian Autonomous Center for Knowledge, some arepure software projects. A case in point isf33dme, a browser-based feed reader. f33dme is a popular project in the hackerspace and as more people adopt it for their needs, it gets more robust and more features are added over time. Although this is nothing new compared to the free software development model found elsewhere, the fact that there is an embodied user community has contributed to its success. There are also ‘hardware hacks’ like the SIDBox, which is built from the music chip from an old Commodore C64 computer, adding USB input and a mini-jack output. This enables the user to play music from a contemporary computer using the chip as an external sound card. An ever expanding ‘hardware corner’ with electronic parts, soldering iron and multimeters facilitates this kind of work. There is also a 3D printer and tools for physical work. The members are precarious ICT workers, researchers at computer security companies, and/or students in related fields. It is a significant aspect of the viability of the hackerspace that quite a few core members work flexible hours or work only occasionally, so at least during some periods they have time to dedicate to the hackerspace. Some of the activities have a direct political character, mostly concentrating on issues such as open data, transparency and privacy. Noteworthy are the collaboration with groups who campaign for information rights issues in the European Parliament and in European countries, or helping journalists to harvest datasets from publicly available databases. The hackerspace sends delegations which represents it atevents in the global hackerspace movement, such as the aforementioned Congress and the Chaos Communication Camp, and smaller ones such as the Stadtflucht sojourn organised by Metalab, a hackerspace in Vienna (Metalab, 2011).

To conclude, the emergence of hackerspaces is in line with a larger trajectory in the hacker movement, which gradually has gained more institutional structures. The turn towards the physical (mainly through utilising micro-controlers) marked the point when hackerspaces became widespread, since development and collaboration on such projects is greatly facilitated by having a shared space. While most discourse and innovation in the community was focused on the organisational form rather than the political content of hackerspaces, such less defined and more liberal-leaning political content allowed the movement to spread and forge connections in multiple directions without loosing its own thrust: from companies through civil society to a general audience."
(Hacker camping was initiated by a series of events in Netherlands running since 1989. These experiences solidified and popularised the hacker movement and the desire for permanent hacker spaces was part of this development.

As Nick Farr (2009) has pointed out, the first wave of pioneering hackerspaces were founded in the 1990s, just as were hacklabs. L0pht stated in 1992 in the Boston area as a membership based club that offered shared physical and virtual infrastructure to select people. Some other places were started in those years in the USA based on this “covert” model. In Europe, C-base in Berlin started with a more public profile in 1995, promoting free access to the Internet and serving as a venue for various community groups. These second wave spaces “proved that hackers could be perfectly open about their work, organise officially, gain recognition from the government and respect from the public by living and applying the Hacker ethic in their efforts” (Farr, 2009). However, it is with the current, third wave that the number of hackerspaces begun to grow exponentially and it developed into a global movement of sorts. I argue that the term hackerspaces was not widely used before this point and the small number of hackerspaces that existed were less consistent and did not yet develop the characteristics of a movement. Notably, this is in constrast with narrative of the hacklabs presented earlier which appeared as a more consistent political movement.

Several accounts (for example Anon, 2008) highlight a series of talks in 2007 and 2008 that inspired, and continue to inspire, the foundation of new hackerspaces. Judging from registered hackerspaces, however, the proliferation seems to have started earlier. In 2007 Farr organised a project called Hackers on a Plane, which brought hackers from the USA to the Chaos Communication Congress, and included a tour of hackerspaces in the area. Ohlig and Weiler from the C4 hackerspace in Cologne gave a ground-braking talk on the conference entitled Building a Hackerspace (2007). The presentation defined the hackerspace design patterns, which are written in the form of a catechism and provide solutions to common problems that arise during the organisation of the hackerspace. More importantly, it has canonised the concept of hackerspaces and put the idea of setting up new ones all over the world on the agenda of the hacker movement. When the USA delegation returned home, they presented their experiences under the programmatic title Building Hacker Spaces Everywhere: Your Excuses are Invalid. They argued that “four people can start a sustainable hacker space”, and showed how to do it (Farr et al, 2008). The same year saw the launch of hackerspaces.org, in Europe with Building an international movement: hackerspaces.org (Pettis et al, 2008), and also in August at the North American HOPE (Anon, 2008). While the domain is registered since 2006, the Internet Archive saw the first website there in 2008 listing 72 hackerspaces. Since then the communication platforms provided by the portal became a vital element in the hackerspaces movement, sporting the slogan “build! unite! multiply!” (hackerspaces.org, 2011). A survey of the founding date of the 500 registered hackerspaces show a growing trend from 2008 (see Figure 2).

Notably, most of these developments focused on the formal characteristics of hackerspaces, for instance how to manage problems and grow a community. They emphasised an open membership model for maintaining a common workspace that functions as a cooperative socialising, learning and production environment. However, the content of the activities going on in hackerspaces also shows great consistency. The technologies used can be described as layers of sedimentation: newer technologies take their place alongside older ones without it becoming entirely obsolete. First of all, the fact that hackers collaborate in a physical space meant a resurgence of work on electronics, which conjoined with the established trend of tinkering with physical computers. A rough outline of connected research areas could be (in order of appearance): free software development, computer recycling, wireless mesh networking, microelectronics, open hardware, 3D printing, machine workshops and cooking.

From this rudimentary time line, it is evident that activities in hackerspaces have gravitated towards the physical. The individual trajectories of all these technology areas could be unfolded, but here the focus will be on microelectronics. This choice of focus is merited because microelectronics played a key role in kickstarting hackerspaces, as evidenced by the popularity of basic electronic classes and programmable microcontroller workshops in the programme of young hackerspaces. Physical computing was layed out by Igoe and O’Sullivan in Physical Computing: Sensing and Controlling the Physical World with Computers (2004), and had a great impact on the whole computing scene. This new framework of human-machine interaction stressed the way people behave in everyday situations using their whole body, and opened the way for exploratory research through the construction of intelligent appliances. The next year O’Reilly Media started to publish Make Magazine which focuses on do-it-yourself technology, including tutorials, recipes, and commentary. Among the authors one find many of the celebrities of the hacker subculture. “The first magazine devoted to digital projects, hardware hacks, and DIY inspiration. Kite aerial photography, video cam stabiliser, magnetic stripe card reader, and much more.” (Make Magazine, 2011) In Europe, Massimo Banzi and others started to work on the invention of Arduino, a programmable microcontroller board with an easy-to-use software interface. This amateur-friendly microcontroller system became the staple of hackerspaces and artists’ workshops and initiated a whole new generation into rapid prototyping and electronics work. To put it together, physical computing provided a theoretical area to be explored, and the Arduino became its killer application, while Make magazine and similar media facilitated the spread of research results. It is open to speculation how this trend fits into the bigger picture of what seems to be a shift in sensibilities in society at large. If the 1990s was marked by a preoccupation with discourses and languages, preeminence is now given to materialities and embodiedness.

The Hungarian Autonomous Center for Knowledge in Budapest is a fairly typical third wave hackerspace. It was founded in 2009 after a presentation at the local new tech meetup, itself inspired by the hackerspaces presentation in Berlin (Stef, 2009). The location is comprised of a workspace, kitchen, chill-out room and terrace in an inner city cultural centre which hosts ateliers for artists along with a pub and some shops. The rent is covered by membership fees and donations from individuals, companies and other organisations. Members are entitled to a key, while visitors can look up when the space is open thanks to a real time signal system called Hacksense. It displays the status of the lab on the website, the twitter account and a database. Thus, visitors are welcome any time, and especially at the announced events that happen a few times every month. These include meetings and community events, as well as practical workshops, presentations and courses. In line with the hackerspaces design patterns, orientating discussions happen weekly on Tuesdays, where decisions are made based on a rough consensus. Hackathons are special events where several people work on announced topics for six hours or a whole day. These events are sometimes synchronised internationally with other hackspaces. However, most of the activity happens on a more ad-hoc basis, depending on the schedule and the whim of the participants. For this reason, the online chat channel and the wiki website are heavily used for coordination, documentation and socialisation. Projects usually belong to one or more individual, but some projects are endorsed by almost everybody.

Among the projects housed at Hungarian Autonomous Center for Knowledge, some arepure software projects. A case in point isf33dme, a browser-based feed reader. f33dme is a popular project in the hackerspace and as more people adopt it for their needs, it gets more robust and more features are added over time. Although this is nothing new compared to the free software development model found elsewhere, the fact that there is an embodied user community has contributed to its success. There are also ‘hardware hacks’ like the SIDBox, which is built from the music chip from an old Commodore C64 computer, adding USB input and a mini-jack output. This enables the user to play music from a contemporary computer using the chip as an external sound card. An ever expanding ‘hardware corner’ with electronic parts, soldering iron and multimeters facilitates this kind of work. There is also a 3D printer and tools for physical work. The members are precarious ICT workers, researchers at computer security companies, and/or students in related fields. It is a significant aspect of the viability of the hackerspace that quite a few core members work flexible hours or work only occasionally, so at least during some periods they have time to dedicate to the hackerspace. Some of the activities have a direct political character, mostly concentrating on issues such as open data, transparency and privacy. Noteworthy are the collaboration with groups who campaign for information rights issues in the European Parliament and in European countries, or helping journalists to harvest datasets from publicly available databases. The hackerspace sends delegations which represents it atevents in the global hackerspace movement, such as the aforementioned Congress and the Chaos Communication Camp, and smaller ones such as the Stadtflucht sojourn organised by Metalab, a hackerspace in Vienna (Metalab, 2011).

To conclude, the emergence of hackerspaces is in line with a larger trajectory in the hacker movement, which gradually has gained more institutional structures. The turn towards the physical (mainly through utilising micro-controlers) marked the point when hackerspaces became widespread, since development and collaboration on such projects is greatly facilitated by having a shared space. While most discourse and innovation in the community was focused on the organisational form rather than the political content of hackerspaces, such less defined and more liberal-leaning political content allowed the movement to spread and forge connections in multiple directions without loosing its own thrust: from companies through civil society to a general audience.)
(http://peerproduction.net/issues/issue-2/peer-reviewed-papers/hacklabs-and-hackerspaces/)

" The Austrian artist Johannes Grenzfurthner, writer and founder of the international art and theory group – monochrom – makes a critical study on hackerspaces in the article “Hacking the Spaces” written in collaboration with Frank Apunkt Schneider . In writing the historical context of hackerspaces originally expanding from the counter culture movement and conceived as niches against bourgeois society, Grenzfurthner and Schneider argue that hackerspaces today function quite differently as they initially did. Back in the seventies, these open spaces were imagined as tiny worlds to escape from capitalism or authoritarian regimes. The idea was much more based on micro-political tactics than on hippie’s spirit:
Instead of trying to transfer the old world into a new one people started to build up tiny new worlds with the old world. They made up open space were people could come together and try out different forms of living, working, maybe loving and whatever people do when they want to do something.

In a capitalist society, alternative concepts always end up to be commodified such as “indie music” becomes mainstream. According to Grenzfurthner and Schneider, the same happened to hackerspaces when “the political approach faded away on en route into tiny geeky workshop paradises” ."